To ascertain the amount of general factor saturation underlying the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck and Steer
1993) responses of anxious patients, the BAI was administered to 525 outpatients with DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorders. McDonald’s omega
hierarchical(
ω h) (Zinbarg et al.
2005) was calculated to estimate the amount of general factor saturation;
ω h is the amount of variance explained by a general (second-order) factor underlying a scale composed of multiple items divided by the total amount of variance explained by all of the scale’s items. An iterated principal-factor analysis was first performed and followed by a Schmid-Leiman transformation to determine the amount of variance explained by the second-order factor.
ω h was 0.70 [95% CI 0.66–0.72], and this value was discussed as supporting the current practice of summing the 21 symptom ratings of the BAI to estimate the overall severity of self-reported anxiety.